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“I went to tea with the Jardines and I never
was at a nicer tea-party. We said poems to each
other most of the time. Mhor’s rendering
of Chesterton’s ‘The Pleasant Town of
Roundabout’ was very fine, but Jock loves best
‘Don John of Austria.’ You would like
Jock. He has a very gruff voice and such surprised
blue eyes, and is fond of weird interjections like
‘Gosh, Maggie!’ and ‘Earls in the
streets of Cork!’ He is a determined foe to
sentiment. He won’t read a book that contains
love-making or death-beds. ‘Does anybody
marry?’ ‘Does anybody die?’ are
his first questions about a book, so naturally his
reading is much restricted.

“The Jardines have the lovable habit of becoming
suddenly overpowered with laughter, crumpled up, and
helpless. You have it, too; I have it; all really
nice people have it. I have been refreshing myself
with Irish Memories since dinner. Do you
remember what is said of Martin Ross? ’The
large conventional jest had but small power over her;
it was the trivial absurdity, the inversion of the
expected the sublimity getting a little above itself
and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal
step over the border—­those were the things
that felled her, and laid her, wherever she might
be, in ruins....’

“Bella Bathgate, I must tell you, remains unthawed.
She hinted to me to-night that she thought the Hydropathic
was the place for me—­surely the unkindest
cut of all. People dress for dinner every night
there, she tells me, and most of them are English,
and a band plays. Evidently she thinks I would
be at home in such company.

“Some day I think you must visit Priorsford
and get to know Miss Bathgate.—­Yours,

“PAM.

“I forgot to tell you that for some dark reason
the Jardines call their cat Sir J.M. Barrie.

“I asked why, but got no satisfaction.

“‘Well, you see, there’s Peter,’
Mhor said vaguely.

“Jock looked at the cat and observed obscurely,
’It’s not a sentimental beast either’—­while
Jean asked if I would have preferred it called Sir
Rabindranath Tagore!”

CHAPTER V

“O, the land is fine,
fine,
I could buy it a’
for mine,
For ma gowd’s as the stooks
in Strathairlie.”

Scots Song.

When Peter Reid arrived at Priorsford Station from
London he stood for a few minutes looking about him
in a lost way, almost as if after thirty years he
expected to see a “kent face” coming to
meet him. He had no -notion where to go; he had
not written for rooms; he had simply obeyed the impulse
that sent him—­the impulse that sends a hurt
child to its mother. It is said that an old horse
near to death turns towards the pastures where he
was foaled. It is true of human beings. “Man
wanders back to the fields which bred him.”

After a talk with a helpful porter he found rooms
in a temperance hotel in the Highgate—­a
comfortable quiet place.